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Sunday, September 02, 2012

Alva Noë - Doping: It's Just Part Of The Game

In his most recent column for NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, philosopher Alva Noë takes a pragmatic view of doping in sports. In his previous column, Making Peace with Our Cyborg Nature, he suggested (to much derision it appears) that performance enhancing drugs are simply another technology in the "extended self" model of human life (i.e., technologies are extensions of mind and body), another tool that extends our abilities and our experiences.

It seems the readers could not grasp that argument - to them, it's just cheating, plain and simple, black and white. So this week, he tries a different approach. Yes, doping is cheating, "but it is cheating that is
intelligible and motivated internal to the game, it is cheating that is
consistent, in so many ways, with the spirit of self-actualization,
creativity, and achievement that is the mark of all sports."

In this argument, doping is cheating in the same way that a base runner takes down the catcher at home base to dislodge the ball, or the same way that a Nascar driver bumps a competitor to get past him (or her), or the same way that a striker goes down as though he was shot with the slightest contact from a defender in a soccer match. These are not the "best moments" of the sport, but they are part of the sport . . . just as PEDs are part of cycling, football, and so many other sports.

Are
performance enhancing drugs just part of the game, proscribed by the
rules but understood by all to be a gray area open to interpretation,
like a tough call by a referee or umpire?

I would like to begin by thanking readers, so many of whom took the effort to express their outrage at my suggestion, posted here last week, that perhaps the widespread criticism of Lance Armstrong,
and other athletes who have been caught doping, is a symptom that we,
the public at large, have not come to terms with something basic about
ourselves, namely, that we are extended beings whose boundaries depend
on the innovative use of technology as much as they depend on anything
more intrinsic to our ourselves.

"It's
about the cheating, dummy!" I think that fairly sums up what so many of
you thought about my proposal. Maybe I had a good thought about
technology, the extended mind, and the like. But, many of you believe,
this has nothing to do with the matter at hand. The matter at hand is
cheating.

Actually, I disagree. The
matter at hand is not really cheating. Cheating is simple. Black and
white. But there's nothing black and white about the current situation.
Drug use in sports is widespread. Outrage against drug use is
widespread. What's going on? Why are we so upset? Why are we unable to get athletes to stop doping? And why do we care so much? Why the outrage?

Let's notice, right off the bat, that organized sports have rules, but that
not all rules are of the same standing. Some rules are constitutive
of the activities they govern. If you take a bus to the finish line, or
take short cuts through back yards, you are breaking the rules of road
running in such a way that, really, you aren't even competing. At best
you are perpetrating a fraud. Putting a piece of metal in your boxing
glove, starting running before the pistol fires, using a motor to drive
your bicycle through the Alps — theses violations are such as to remove
you from any claim even to have participated.

But
not all rules are defining in this way. The differences between the
rules of NBA basketball and that of international or college play are
substantial; but they are different ways of playing the same game,
basketball. And baseball has changed many rules over the years —
introducing the foul-strike rule, for example — without thereby
destroying the game. The game has merely evolved.

Rules
governing what athletes may eat, drink, or otherwise consume, and how
they may legitimately train for competition, these fall into this second
category of non-constitutive rules. You can't compare breaking a rule
of this kind with breaking a rule of the first kind. Taking a drug to
improve your performance is nothing like slipping a drug into your
opponent's breakfast cereal. Eating a banned substance is nothing like
using a motor in a bicycle race. It is just sloppy reasoning —
equivocating between the different kinds of rules involved — to suggest
that it is. Cheating comes in different varieties.

The thing about the first kind of rule, the constitutive ones, is that they define the limits of the game. They let you say this
is inside and anything else is outside. Running across the diamond from
first to third is excluded in baseball. According to the rules, it
falls outside.

But this isn't true of
the second kind of rule. The interesting thing about these rules is that
they get formulated not at the boundaries of the game, but within it.
And they remain, always, within the sport, areas of live concern and
contention.

Consider: you can't drug an
opponent to win a game. That's excluded by the basic, constitutive
rules. But what about throwing the ball at a batter's head, or ramming
into a defending catcher so hard that you threaten to hurt him in an
effort to get him to drop the ball, as happened (for the umpteenth time)
this past week?
There are rules against this sort of thing as well. But note, although
the rules proscribe these actions, the actions in question are not
exactly excluded. The interesting thing here is not merely that players
routinely pitch to intimidate, or slide to take out a defender. The
interesting thing is that it actually belongs to the culture of the game
to dispute whether such play is legitimate or not. The controversy
happens not at the limits of the game, but at its heart.

And
to test those internal limits, to be willing to give your all even at
the risk of injury to yourself and to others, is actually what is
required of any player who aims at excellence.

Now
my proposal is this: doping is a violation of this latter kind. Doping
does not put you outside the game in the way that driving to the finish
line of a running race would. Doping is more like the unclean slide or
the bean ball. It may be cheating, but it is cheating that is
intelligible and motivated internal to the game, it is cheating that is
consistent, in so many ways, with the spirit of self-actualization,
creativity, and achievement that is the mark of all sports. Any athlete
committed to being the best he or she can be, to going to new heights,
is going to need to be willing to take risks of this kind.

One
benefit of this proposal is that it explains why doping persists
despite the efforts to ban it. Asking an athlete not to dope is like
asking him to hold back while running the bases. There's good reasons to
make that request. And good reasons for it to be disregarded.

I
think it also explains why passions run so high. If doping were merely a
matter of violating constitutive rules, then we'd simply disqualify the
players and get on with it. But doping, like unclean slides in
baseball, or roughness in hockey, but also, perhaps, like zone defense
in basketball, is a hot topic, a controversial gray area, an area where
we have strong feelings and are drawn to take a stand. These are open
controversies that belong to the life of the games in question. We
debate these questions on the inside.

The
important point is this. From the standpoint of the athlete — and as
fans we identify with the athlete — doping isn't cheating any more than
sliding hard is cheating. Doping doesn't put you outside the game any
more than sacrificing your marriage or getting up at 3:30 every morning
so that you can get time at the ice rink puts you outside the game.
Athletes are in it for the achievement. Athletes will not say No.

And
that's why sports matter to us. We are not outsiders looking down on
life. We are players. We can never take the rules of life for granted.
We are learning them, or figuring them out, or making them up, or,
sometimes, trying to change them, as we go along. If sports were merely
about the moves that can be made in the space defined by the rules, I
don't think we'd find sports that interesting. Sports are about living a
life as a player. And players, like the rest of us, test the limits. At
least if they are ambitious. They don't say no. And they don't fear
going outside normal play. Because they understand — again, this is why
sports matter — that, from their point of view, there is no outside.You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe